Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [140]
“Indeed,” Data said, “since it can logically be adapted, though with fairly extensive modifications, to go looking for other alternative universes, as posited in other hyperstring work which Commander Hwiii has done. Imagine, for example, a universe in which neither the Federation nor the Klingon empires exist, and the Romulans have become dominant. Think what the Romulans in our own universe might bring home from a visit to such a place.”
They thought about that, and concerned glances were exchanged around the table. “Not our problem at the moment,” Picard said, “fortunately. We’ll leave that to Starfleet. Full reports from all your departments will need to go in to them tomorrow. I’ll expect them by eighteen hundred hours. Is there anything else?”
“One thing,” Dr. Crusher said. “The stress levels around here the past couple of days have been unusually high. Intervention is required.”
Hwiii turned an interested eye on her. “In what form?” Picard said.
She pushed a padd over to him. “This should be posted on all the private terminals.”
He looked at the screen. It said:
CMDR. W. RIKER
AND LT. WORF
INVITE YOU TO A
NIGHT AT THE OPERA
COME AS YOU ARE
TWENTY HUNDRED HOURS
BLACK TIE OPTIONAL
MAIN HOLODECK TWO
Picard pushed it back toward her. “Medicine takes strange forms sometimes,” he said. “Make it so.”
When one stepped in the door of the holodeck, the noise of shouting, laughter, and the orchestra tuning up was considerable. A great gilded hallway hung with glittering chandeliers stretched off in either direction, with red velvet-backed doors set in the far wall, the entrances to the boxes. Picard walked down to box twelve; a liveried footman in a powdered wig, standing outside it, bowed to him and opened the door.
The dimness inside the box made it hard to tell clearly what was going on, but the bigger chandeliers of the house beyond the boxes were dimming. Picard made his way carefully among the occupied seats. The audience, borrowed from some other time and place, were having scattered fistfights already, and the performance hadn’t even begun.
Picard sat down on a velvet-cushioned Louis Quinze chair and looked around. Off to his left, Worf and Riker were sitting.
“I could not get the tie done,” Worf said, frowning, to Riker. “This business of ceremonial ligature is very strange.”
“Here, let me help,” Riker said, and sat there for a few moments reworking it. “What have you got here, the Gordian knot? It’s going to take phasers to get this thing loose.”
“I could not stop tying it. It just seemed to want to keep on going.”
The noise from down in the orchestra was increasing, both the musicians’ and the crowd’s. “Is this a private riot,” Picard said over his shoulder, “or can anyone join in?”
“Paris Opera,” Worf said to him as the overture began, “June 1896. Apparently there was another resurgence of anti-Masonic feeling.”
“Oh, dear,” Picard said. “Poor Mozart.”
The overture finished. The opera began, with Geordi running across the stage in his uniform from the other ship, synching with the voice of the tenor singing Tamino, the hero of the opera, something along the lines of “It’s after me, it’s after me!” He was promptly pursued across the stage by the required Monster, a creature that looked suspiciously like numerous of the staff from engineering operating a hastily cobbled together Chinese “street dragon” made of used blankets from sickbay and a painted waste container for the head. “Tamino” swooned convincingly at the sight of this apparition and fell over. The Three Ladies appeared in the form of Lieutenants Hessan, Renner, and Egli, stunned the Monster with phasers, and began “singing” charmingly about the beautiful daughter of the Queen of the Night, and how Tamino really ought to get together with her.
The boxes continued to fill up. Picard glanced around him and saw mostly bridge crew, but Lieutenant Barclay was here, too, being feted by his coworkers in the computer department, and Dr. Crusher was sitting off to one side,